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Just for backup reason a summary of my Twitter messages. It is always a nice way to reexperience the developments of a certain time period. For this reason my most important Twitter messages from April 2015 until May 2015. Read more...

Just for backup reason a summary of my Twitter messages. It is always a nice way to reexperience the developments of a certain time period. For this reason my most important Twitter messages from January 2015 until March 2015. Read more...

On May 2015, Myriel Milicevic invited me for a Guestlecture & Workshop on Artistic Human Plant Interfaces/Elektrobotanik for her Interfacing with Nature class at University of Applied Science Potsdam. The starting 90-120min lecture provided the students (in that case communication, product, and interface designer) an introduction about interfaces with plants. This includes viusal approaches as well as bio sensing projects.

The human perception responds positively on natural environments with many plants. Especially, during the seasons spring and autumn people are excited by the shape and colours of plants. The photo series “Season Patterns” is an artistic approach of capturing and documenting these feelings of beauty caused by nature [Schwepenhäuser2007, pages 70-71].

Previous landscape painters already tried to capture the broad range of natural elegance in their artworks. Their approaches were very often accurate in every detail of the landscape, but still the painters were not satisfied with their visual representations of the landscapes. For this reason, the photo series “Season Patterns” uses a visual abstract expression for representing the prettiness of nature and plants.

The theoretical and practical part of this thesis proposed techniques and applications for Human Plant Interfaces. The results of the qualitative analysis and the practical work exposed evidences for the relevance of the topic Human Plant Interaction.

The theoretical analysis pointed out that plants are a valid material for visualization applications. The applied techniques are heavily depending on the data characteristics. For long term data visualization the usage of plant displays with their changing appearance ability through plants growth is an appropriate tool. In contrast to this, visualizing real-time data requires a different approach. Simple data values or the visualizations of state changes in an interactive system can be performed through kinetic gestures of a plant (e.g. movement of branches). More complex data can be visualized with the help of projection mapping techniques. The physical size of these visualizations varied from small (table-size) to huge.

The last introduced projects were characterized by its approach of attaching data to a plant. In this project “Charisma Garden” (2013 - 2014), the data will be directly integrated in the health and growth process of a plant. In comparison to the “Travelling Plants” and “Dead Tree Project”, the data is not added to the plant then rather the representation of the data is the plant by itself in this project. In relation to the chapter “3.1. Visualizing techniques with plants” on page 44, the “Charisma Garden” project can be assigned to the category plant displays and takes over the role as a data sculpture. This dynamic (visually changing) data sculpture presents the social activity of a Facebook user.

The previous project “Travelling plants” explored the possibilities of connecting digital communication technology with plants. People’s reaction emerged like expected, but the involvement of digital communication technology provides still some space for further experiments. Therefore, the new experiment named “Dead Tree Drop” connects and stores location-based digital data directly on a plant within an urban natural environment. In the course of this thesis the strong relationship between plant-based artwork and its environment were described before. For this reason plants can be associated with local characteristics. Moreover, humans like to stay and rest in natural environments, where they often like to read books and magazines. These initial conditions inspired me to create a physical interface for local-based digital information within natural urban environments.

The previous chapter described the artwork “Season Patterns”, which captured natural environmental changes. The interactive relationship only existed between the artist and his surrounding natural environment. In contrast to that, the collaboration project “Travelling Plants” with Juliane Springsguth created a direct interactive relationship between plants and humans as well as between humans and humans.

The interaction between humans and plants intended to improve the human well-being. This improvement was applied in an urban context, where the daily life is characterized by stress and appointments [Shoemaker2002, page 140]. Public transport as a public space is a location where people have the time to rest, although the environment does not provide a relaxing friendly atmosphere. Under these circumstances, a setting with plants has the ability to transform a stressful mood to a relaxing state of mind more easily [Shoemaker2002, pp. 181]. The famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted assigned plants a healing power for the human mind [Flagler1994, page 232]. Read more...